The Storm Before the Calm

A New Series Pulls the Pasties Off America's Early Era of Scandalous Cinema

By

Bruce Bennett

July 14, 2011

To many, the words "New York" connote unchecked self-expression and serial impiety. But on the occasion of Film Forum's "Essential Pre-Code," a 50-film survey, beginning Friday, of depression-era Hollywood's racy talking pictures, it is worth remembering that during this period the Empire State was the film-censorship capital of the nation.

In 1915, the Supreme Court decided that free-speech protection did not extend to the morally questionable moving-picture industry. Six years later, New York's Motion Picture Commission (reorganized as part of the state's Department of Education in 1926) hit the moral high ground running—striving, in the words of Governor Nathan L. Miller, to "remedy what everyone concedes has grown to be a very great evil." By 1930, the industry as a whole had adopted the Motion Picture Production Code of censorship guidelines.

Until 1965, when the last in a series of high-court rulings in favor of the First Amendment effectively ended the commission's reign of piety, any film distributor seeking exhibition anywhere in New York was required by state law to submit a film print, dialogue script and a by-the-reel fee to Albany for review. The picture would then be screened by a member reviewer and either approved, returned to the distributor with a list of required editorial "eliminations," or rejected outright.

According to the New York State Archive's online inventory of censorship scripts, of the 50 films in Film Forum's survey, 23 were subject to New York State censor "eliminations." Two films, "Baby Face"—which will screen in the Library of Congress's recently discovered pre-censorship version—and "The Story of Temple Drake," were rejected outright.

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Owen Moore and Mae West in 'She Done Him Wrong' (1933), in which Ms. West famously purred, 'Why don't you come up sometime and see me?'
Everett Collection

The "pre-code" era concluded when the motion-picture industry moved from the toothless guidelines of 1930 to a binding Production Code Administration in 1934. This centralized self-censorship was hastened, in part, by a combined effort by New York, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kansas, Florida and Massachusetts to force Hollywood to toe the moral line.

But until industry-wide fears of federal censorship and boycott changed their tune in 1934, pre-code tastemakers such as Warner Bros. production chief Darryl F. Zanuck characterized the early-'30s move toward prurience as a crusade of its own. A depression-era picture, Zanuck told the Hollywood Reporter in 1932, needed "the punch and smash" of "a headline on the front page of any successful metropolitan daily" to lure impoverished jazz-age audiences into seats.

And yet, despite Zanuck's ballyhoo, behind the scenes Hollywood's compliance with the wishes of New York censors was swift and nearly universal. The reason, according to Mike Mashon, the head of Library of Congress's Moving Image Section, was purely financial. "If New York City was not allowed to show your film, your film was almost guaranteed not to make money," he said.

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James Cagney and Jean Harlow in 'The Public Enemy' (1931).
Photofest

But someone was making money. While researching her two books on America's experiment in state-controlled movie morality, Laura Wittern-Keller of the Department of History at SUNY-Albany unearthed evidence of the New York commission's own financial success. "The New York State censor board always turned a handsome profit," Ms. Wittern-Keller said. "Just to have a film reviewed, a distributor paid three dollars a reel. They were paying to have their own films censored."

That profit margin was aided, Ms. Wittern-Keller said, by the fact that each examiner's compensation was modest. "They were relatively low-grade civil servants," she said of what was, for most of the decade, a team of four women reviewers and two men tasked with individual film-exhibitor compliance. "They weren't making a lot of money."

But while the New York State Archive's collection of Film Commission scripts is a treasure trove for film historians, individual censors' names and backgrounds have eluded scholars. "I wanted to know who the censors were," Ms. Wittern-Keller said. "I also wanted to know why they weren't drug-addicted, sex-addict, homicidal maniacs from watching all these movies. Before [the Commission's complete papers] were sent to the archive, they were culled. We know the name of the chief censor, but the reviewers who worked underneath him—of course it was always a 'him'—we don't even know their names."

However, one tantalizing glimpse into the agenda of a civil-service guardian of decency identified as "Miss Farrell" does remain. In her undated recommendation of eliminations for 1932's "Red Headed Woman," starring Jean Harlow as a randy stenographer, the professional viewer invoked sisterhood of a kind in laying blame for the film's inappropriateness at the feet of director Jack Conway rather than Harlow.

"If he had not portrayed her in a blatantly indecent way," Miss Farrell wrote, "the eliminations in this picture would probably not have been directed."

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